Comments

"I’m introducing a bill to end aid to Pakistan in the coming days. My bill will take the money that would have gone to Pakistan and put it in an infrastructure fund to build roads and bridges here at home."

Should be politically popular and easy to sell.
GOPe beginning to thaw a bit?

I am still shocked about the HALF A TRILLION DOLLARs in mismanaged funds at HUD. I sure do like the fact that all the cabinet secretaries seem to have hit the ground running - the review audit was called for on Nov. 15, 2016. No time wasted by the incoming administration.

How do the mismanaged funds affect the inner cities? I think we’re about to find out. In 2008, an opinion piece in the NYTimes thought HUD should be abolished. Obama didn’t heed that advice. So what happened to all the mismanaged money?

(2) Most commentators focus on the second paragraph that alleged violations of 18 U.S.C §1001 which prohibits making false statements to the federal government, which in this case applies to Steele’s testimony to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. https://t.co/6Cv7wkczRY

Good morning JOM folks. We spent the week in Charleston. Crazy weather week. Tuesday we got 5-6 inches of snow. Biggest snow flakes I’ve ever seen. When we left most of it was still on the ground other then what had been plowed away. The grandkids loved it and our son had 2 days off because roads were too bad to travel.

I am grateful that we have a business guy in charge who is willing to call BS on this stuff.
No one has paid attention to the money floating around in all of my lifetime

It's not the political class's money in terms of earning it through the sweat of their brow so it's less valuable to them. This is a pernicious problem with having lifetime pols even among those on "our side". And it regularly escapes the chattering class, particularly the NeverTrumps.

An intense public battle has erupted between Fusion GPS, the firm behind a controversial dossier of opposition research on on President Trump, and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Executives at the opposition research firm are accusing Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and panel Republicans of selectively leaking snippets of their testimony to paint a distorted picture of their work and the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The feud spilled into public view on Tuesday, when Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch published a scathing op-ed for the New York Times, titled “The Republicans’ Fake Investigations.”

In the op-ed, Simpson and Fritsch called on Republicans to release the full transcripts of their testimony to three congressional panels, including the Senate Judiciary Committee, "so that the American people can learn the truth."

That drew a swift rebuke from Grassley. A spokesman for the senator said it was Simpson that had insisted “that the transcript be kept confidential,” adding that an invitation for Simpson to testify in public “remains on the table.”

I saw yesterday that Mueller is investigating Ivanka for exchanging pleasantries with Russians in the Trump Tower elevator.

I think starting out Mueller's primary goal--after getting something on Trump--was to protect the FBI's 7th Floor cabal's dirty dealings, but he's pretty much failed at that. So at this point I think Mueller is now using the SC mostly just to save his own ass. Like a MAD situation. Leave me alone, or I'll nail one of your kids with some process crime. Or I can even bring an obstruction of justice charge and maybe get you impeached. And in the meantime, he's hoping he can drag it all out until the Dems take the Congress.

The trouble for him, though, is that the longer he plays that game, the more his power wanes, as the FBI's corruption becomes more and more apparent to the general public. And the better the economy gets the less likely it becomes that the Dems actually can retake the Congress, esp. the Senate.

A lot is going to depend, I think, on the OIG's report, and how much dirt, if any, they've found clinging to him. He seems to have been in the middle of that Uranium One deal, so we'll see. The OIG report could turn out to be a white wash.

Mueller getting throatslashed will be fun. At some point he'll have to figure out which ones of the crooked ambulance chasers he brought on don't have a bright orange dot between their beady avaricious eyes and can defend him.

Jane, that is an excellent question and one that I almost proffered a caution about last night when the $500B number came out. The headline number is often very misleading because it usually just means that some beans were listed in one column and not in the correct column, and sometimes that even makes each errant bean count twice (one column has too many beans and another has two few, etc.).

So the headlines always want to suggest that somebody stole the beans when all the audit might actually mean is the accounting for them was sloppy but they are all still there.

That said, the whole purpose of proper accounting is to make it easy to instantly spot somebody stealing beans, and also to make sure beans are being collected and spent pursuant to the budgets and expectations of the Board or in this case Congress. If nobody is counting them properly, then obviously very bad things can happen. In theory, bad things might not be happening at all, but nobody would know. As the resident cynic who always warns about what human nature can do, odds are such sloppiness improperly benefitted somebody to some degree with a lot of zeros.

Errors of that magnitude are a huge deal, and illustrate management and oversight deficiencies of immense importance, but not necessarily for the reason you might think.

Somebody last night expressed an inability to decide which color hat Rosenstein is wearing.

Easy peazy. He drafted the charter for Mueller and accepted the obligation to manger Mueller within the limits of that charter. If he used weasel words to make the guadrails the public thought were there, not there, then he wears a black hat. If he observed Mueller going places the public thought were not intended and rather than jerk him back he found Robertesque ways to read the words, then he wears a black hat. If in his career he has been involved in shenanigans which let the CCF skate through checks and balances, then he wears a black hat.

OL, it starts at the local level. School boards are notoriously untransparent about their books because they think it's their fucking money to do whatever they want with. My current rant is the school breakfast and lunch program for kids with poor/deadbeat parents that can't or won't feed their children. Why is this being paid for by education money instead of social services money? Maybe it is but until the schools open their books nobody knows.

Tru dat, Cap'n. It goes back to exchange SBW and I had yesterday about understanding history and human nature. Human nature is such that somebody else's assets are never guarded as carefully as one's own; everybody would like to have more goodies than fewer; humans would rather control other people than be controlled by them. Then, starting with the Bible, history offers up all the actual examples one would ever need to have those points hit home along with seeing what bad things can derive from them.

I recall a lesson from my very first accounting class lo some 50+ years ago. We were given a set of books which did not balance by $1. As newbies, many of us thought "big deal...not worth the time to track it down".

We were then led through all the misapplied debits and credits and the sins they covered which just happened to offset each other except for that $1.

OL. Re the OIG. I read the other day that while the IG may doing sterling work, his deputy is part of the swamp. The final product may look nothing like what we are glimpsing now.

Additionally, the first go round with the media and pundits will reflect what is in the executive summary. The executive summary may be written in such a way so as to slant the report in one way or another without reflecting the true nature of the contents.

I’m just so furious about $500bil being “mismanaged,” and imagine that bad accounting hides a host of expenditures that taxpayers would prefer to not be supporting.

My BIL, a wealthy connected CEO who did not vote for Trump and paid off our bet with a lovely bottle of Effin, asked me in Nov. 2016 what would end my support for Trump as a president. He was hung up on the wall and the economy improving and Clinton going to jail as Trump selling out his base. I told him if he drained the swamp, cleared up the corruption, and made how taxpayer funds are spent transparent, that I would be a satisfied supporter.